Welcome to SOUL ISSUE The African American Perspective.

I'm here with the executive director of the Ezekiel Project, Breane Arthur Jones, a community organization, dedicated to community enrichment.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

So, first thing I'd like to ask you about is, for our viewers, what is the heal project?

The Ezekiel Project is a faith based organization.

So we are interfaith, we're interracial, we're intergenerational.

We work with the community on issues.

And one way we do that is to basically start with the churches that sit in a community, and we like to go out and do what we call a porch talks.

And through those porch talks, we find out about issues that are affecting community members, and we take that back and disseminate that information to create core groups.

And part of what we make sure to emphasize that we are not as the Ezekiel project coming in to fix any issues for anybody.

We want to identify leaders in our communities and in our congregations, and train them on how to advocate for themselves.

How long has the Ezekiel Project been going for?

So we've been around since 97.

We were founded by a group of pastors who were responding to a few different issues in the city.

One was, a vandalism vandalism issue that occurred at one of the churches.

They banded together to get the vandalism, to get the graffiti removed off of the church.

And then there was a few other incidents that were happening around the same time.

So they created the project again to just create some momentum within the congregations about how they could affect change within those communities that they're sitting in, you know, on a daily basis.

What are the challenges that you see, specifically in the modern world?

Because, you know, a lot is changing currently.

What are the new, you know, struggles you meet, you're facing as, as a community organizer?

One huge thing I would say is just the aging church population.

So again, when you start in 97, the group that is working with us as a younger group, they're vibrant.

And then what we saw in the pandemic is that most of the churches took a hit, and that didn't matter if you were Pentecostal, Baptist, non-denominational.

Everyone took a hit, and then now you have a lot of people attending online virtual services.

So there is I really wanna say that travel to the problem.

You don't have the youth that you had necessarily in the congregations.

So you're looking at how do you bring youth and younger people into the congregations?

Because our elders are just that.

They're elders and they're wanting to train and mentor and move forward.

You're dealing with not having the population in the churches physically anymore.

They are online, and that's great.

But how do you get them to engage in person?

And then we're also looking at the community not necessarily being what it used to be, whether it was a community full of people who rent it.

So now they've moved on and there's a higher turnover there, or there are so many people who have left Saginaw.

So again, when you're looking at the population decrease that is affecting our work as well as a community organization, because there has to be a community for us to cater to.

And we are starting to lose some of that recognition out there in that way.

So is now how do we go and cultivate our name with this new group of people who are in the city or who are moving into the city?

How do we bring that back to the forefront?

So I it's a trifold issue there.

know, I think people here faith based organizing and I think, you know, what most people and most people say, probably Martin Luther King, you know, and I think in that era there were, there was a huge, upswell of youth movement.

And I right now I feel like there's a disconnect in terms of I see a lot of youth who seem to, want to re collectivize and they don't know where to begin and they don't know, where to look in a lot of cases.

So, I mean, how, how do you, how do you want to reach back out to them?

So one thing we did last year, and it was a pilot program, we went into the schools to do a civic engagement day.

So we partnered with Saginaw Public Schools to work with Saginaw United.

We hosted 58 children and were teens.

They're not even children.

They're teenagers.

But we hosted 58 teens to talk about their responsibility for civic engagement.

So why is it important to vote?

How you can now get preregister to vote if you're 16?

The importance of that.

But we also allowed them to host a student led school board for them.

So when we went in, you know, we did a few talking points with the students who were going to be the moderators and the timekeepers.

But I told them, this is your event.

So you come up with the questions, we'll just do a quick proof over to make sure they're all set.

And we allowed them to really have that time with it was three of our school board candidates at the time to really to talk about their issues.

And then we did a workshop with them, two on how to cut an issue.

And what is the issue could mean for them and what are your next steps?

So I'm very big on accountability.

The organization is big on accountability and even in that we tell, you know, just make sure to let them know your school board is accountable to you as a student and to your parents as taxpayers.

So this is important for you to be involved in.

And what we found is you have to be careful when you work with teenagers because they'll feel like you came in and did a thing and there's no follow through.

So what we have been focusing our on is what is our next step.

So the key is gave us, you know, issues from each group that they wanted to work on within the school.

How do we come now and teach them how to work on that issue.

So we do have a designated youth organizer who has been working in the education space and who is working to reengage those students that we had last year.

And the beautiful part is we had mainly juniors, so we'll get another year to go back into the school and say, okay, now let's partner with the student council and let's talk about how you can go to the administration and say, hey, we want to talk about this issue and what a win would look like for them.

So that's been part of it.

One thing I would say we are struggling with is, again, the congregation centric piece of the youth.

I think when you're looking at you do have kids that are slowly coming back into the congregations.

So a lot of what we've been trying to do there is figure out where we can support them in building up their youth group and building up their youth work.

And there was a, documentary Stokely Carmichael, went down to Lounge County, and I think the biggest focus and the biggest piece for me that was inspiring was that they were young, there were young people.

And I think that we don't give young people enough credit that they are smart and that they have issues and they have things they want to work on.

And how do we now build them up as leader?

So that was my long answer to your question.

But we work with training them on leadership as well.

What are some of those generational differences that you've, that you've noticed in terms of, you know, how, how organizing work back then versus now?

I think technology has played a huge part in what organizing looks like.

When you're looking at organizing in the 60s, you didn't have a choice but to pick up a phone.

You didn't have a choice but to know who your neighbors were.

And now when you're coming into this group in this age, especially when you're trying to do organizing with young people, the big push has been to go back to the roots of relational organizing.

And there is a disconnect because people feel like, well, if I'm on Facebook, I'm having a relationship, or if we're on Instagram, it's a relationship and there's a huge difference in having an online following and being able to get people to move and do a thing and sustain the momentum of the organizing.

And I think that that is where there's a piece of disconnect there.

And I think that what's been hard, I guess, to say to bridge is that we have leaders again who are older and some who have gone through the civil rights movement, and they remember what that was like to get out and to hold hands and to say, okay, we're going to boycott together and put our bodies on the line and the way this group does it is very different.

You have influencers now who are telling you what to think and how to think and how to boycott.

And one of the most interesting things I've looked at lately was, are we boycotting target or not?

And there feels like there's almost less at stake sometimes when there's almost more at stake right now.

But when you're online and everybody has a stage and a platform for a think piece, to me it dilutes some of the movement and the momentum you can get when you're organizing.

How do you believe we prioritize our needs?

Like, you know, different people have different needs, from different backgrounds.

How do we, what what do you think is the best way of of, finding out?

You know what?

What we tackle first, I think the biggest thing is getting back out and listening to people.

So I was not a canvasing fanatic.

I was not super excited about.

Let's get out and go door to door.

But when we did it last year, it was so fun to do number one.

And I think we forget that that we grew up in an era where you were out knocking on the door of your neighbor, and you weren't calling the house or texting somebody to get out.

But it was a good way for us to take a temperature of what was happening, and it was even shocking for us.

So when we're sitting in an office, as organizers, we're saying, well, here's what we think is happening out here and here's what we think.

So for Bernie, the priority might have been grief support for the youth or transportation in in the city.

When we got out, people were like, well, yeah, youth program is huge for us.

Criminal activity is a thing.

We want to figure out how to be more neighborly with each other.

And what we found is that even in each part of the city, there's a different issue that is a priority.

And we decided to just take you piece by piece because you can't attack everything at once.

We took the three main neighborhoods, the three areas that we went out into, and we said, okay, let's disseminate the information out.

Like we got out.

We talked to people.

How do we now help to identify some people in those neighborhoods or congregations in the area who can help support and what they need?

So just for one example, on the east side, blight is a huge issue.

And again, going into the porch talks, I was like, I bet you they're going to say is transportation.

And that wasn't that.

So we have to be careful sometimes that even what we think needs to be tackled is what the community is also in agreeance and saying.

And the best way we do that is just getting out by talking to people and the porch talks.

We had done that in the past.

It took a bit of a hit again during the pandemic, and we had to recalibrate how we did it, and last year we were able to do it alongside, you know, our voter education push.

So we did a big nonpartisan push with that.

So if you're talking to us about blight, well, here's kind of a pipeline to your state representative and why this is important to vote or why it's important to vote for your Senate and your House and your the primaries were such a big piece, you know, intricate piece.

And we were really push and turnout.

But it all works together.

And that was just a really big part of what we did last year.

We're hoping to do a form of it again this year with more to congregations getting out with us and going to talk to people in the areas.

All right.

You guys have, regular, you know, meetings that are open to the community.

Your next one is in April is April 24th, April 24th.

Okay.

Could you, give, somebody unfamiliar, a little bit of what they can expect at a at an easy project community meeting?

Absolutely.

So we do talk a little bit about the issues, especially because we are working on some of the carryover issues from porch talks last year.

However, one thing we're looking to do is support those core groups that we were able to form.

So again, we worked on education, health and safety.

And youth was a big piece of what we wanted to do in those core groups, because those are three of the main issues that we are, they're able to come out and actually help to make some steps to make move.

So we wanted people to talk about it.

That's great.

But what we want to get out of is let's get on Facebook and complain.

We want to figure out what the next step is.

So who do we hold accountable for this next piece that we need to do?

As the youth are starting to work on what are our behavioral interventions?

Look at Mike in the schools.

So how do we put a behavioral intervention plan together as a group?

And then how do we take that to the next school board meeting.

How do we one group was really interested in the traffic signals in their area.

And there are some problematic areas on the east side that are not getting the attention it needs.

Okay.

How do we get together as a neighborhood group and say we are unsafe because cars are running a stop signs and their children out to play?

And where is the accountability?

So where's the next step?

How do we go to the city as a group and say, we need this sign put in place and we don't need a date three months out from now?

We need a date next week.

We need somebody to come out and do that.

So part of what we're doing is that getting together, talking through and creating a plan, we're doing what you call power analysis, which is who do we need to talk to.

So we're not wasting time talking to the wrong people.

And we're working through accountability measures with that.

And they were also putting plans in place that if we go and we ask for a thing and it doesn't happen, what's our next step?

We don't want to ever make people feel like, well, we try everything and you walk away from it.

People should be accountable to you.

The city is accountable to us.

The our politicians are accountable to us.

So what is our next step there?

And it's a good place to just find support.

A lot of times people will have things that are happening and it's multiple people, and we're not really banding together in the way that we should.

So our general meetings are a good place to do that, and they're a good place to start training.

So we're trying to infuse training into every little meeting that we do.

Every piece.

We have a wonderful organizer who is getting ready to step into some leadership training in that way, and she's fantastic with showing you what your next steps are.

And how do you start to become a better leader in your community.

So as the director of the Ezekiel Project, how do you find, balance?

I know that, there's a lot of work to be done.

Nick, I be a laugh.

I told you I found it actually, I'm still working through finding it.

I have two small children, and I have a son that we lost in 2022.

So I am also finding balance in grief and in the work that I'm doing in the community.

And part of why I took the job in the first place is because after my son died, I said, I don't want to do another thing that doesn't matter.

Everything from here on out has to matter.

To me.

But I also want to be careful that the needs of the community and the needs of the work don't cause me to sacrifice my other two children in my time and my space with them.

One thing I'm very big on with my children is bringing them along with me.

Just to make sure that they can see, like.

And this work has been ingrained in me in that way because I was brought along with my grandmother and my mother.

And so I'm making sure that I bring my daughters along.

And a lot of times, so they are with me, alongside me in the work.

But it, it also involves a lot of balance with self-care and making sure that I am taking time because you can be so full of the fight, and you can be so full of the passion to to keep fighting, that you can tire yourself out very quickly.

And I ran into that a little earlier this year.

So just taking time to know my limits has been a big thing for me, and to make sure that I'm making space for myself, for my husband and for my family.

And just trying to have fun.

Because when you're working with community and community issues, especially with the election last year, it was such a, hot button issue across the board.

And I don't think I've ever cried about an election before, but when we got done, I think I just, I want to say it was like November 7th.

I just cried to just decompress from all of all we had done, getting out and talking to people and making sure people knew that they can get registered to vote.

I was talking to somebody about getting registered at 8:00, like the night.

I'm like, you got to make sure you get out here.

Oh, and you got to get in here really fast.

So just making sure that I've been prioritizing myself, I'm a believer in God, so making sure that I'm listening to the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit is saying to rest, when the Holy Spirit is saying to move, that I move when it tells me to move.

And having a really, really good support system and having a really good staff also helps because I'm able, if I need a minute to say, okay, I got to just take a minute to wind down.

I have staff that I can give and, a project to, and they'll still pick it up and they'll keep it going and they recognize the need for self-care as well.

So we all support each other in this work.

Great.

And then, lastly, I just like to ask you, I want to follow up on what you were just talking about with being brought up in the world of, faith based organizing.

Could you talk about, your relationship to your your mother and your grandmother like you were talking about just now?

Is definitely legacy.

And it's a legacy that I had no idea I totally be willing to step into.

My degree is in marketing and management, and I love to draw and sketch and do all things creative.

So when I saw the post, I'm going to be honest, it took me.

I think the Holy Spirit dropped it in into my atmosphere four times in my emails before I even apply for the position.

And right before I did, I called my mom and I was like, hey, I think I'm gonna do the same.

And she's like, I don't know.

We'll try it and see.

But I grew up with very strong women.

My grandmother is from Tennessee.

She came up during the civil rights movement.

She was spat on one.

And it has informed her for it moving forward in her life.

And she has always fought for the person who didn't have a voice.

She always taught me to speak up for people who don't have a voice.

She.

I've been to countless school board meetings in Saginaw.

I feel like me and the Board of Education were best friends at one point.

As a small child, my mother worked in the school district, and they both.

I watched them advocate for children, even to where it could have cost them their jobs.

But they knew that this was bigger than them in a sense.

And I'm watching them now in their communities be pillars.

I'm watching my mom, you know, she is very community oriented.

She loves children.

She's working with senior citizens and I think the biggest thing that I've gotten from the both of them is that is never not your problem, because at some point it will come to your doorstep and it will be your problem, and that you don't get to live in this community and in this life.

And God give you all of these things and these blessings that he has for you, and that you don't do anything with that.

And you are you owe something back to this community that birthed you.

Saginaw gave me a lot.

It made me a lot of who I am, and they are still here and they are still working to.

And it's really inspired me to to keep going and to build and even in moments when I'm tired, they always come along and show me where the silver lining is in the work.

And they showed me where a silver lining is, or this is how somebody has been affected.

So it is inspiring.

It's an encouragement for me.

Awesome.

Thank you so much, Brenae for being a guest here on the show with me.

You said that your next meeting is on April 24th.

April 24th at Christ Community.

It's on the south side, and it'll be at 6 p.m.. And we do have food and refreshments.

The Ezekiel Project, check them out online and, get involved.

I hope to see everyone out there.

I'll likely be out there myself.

Thank you so much for being my guest.

And, we'll see you in the next one.

Thank you so much for having me.